Swift vs. Trump

And Gettysburg, or not

            What if the situations in which the two most famous people in the world have found themselves were reversed?

            What if it was Taylor Swift who was being charged with protecting her popularity by paying hush money to a sex worker. And it was Donald Trump who had just released a record-setting new album called The Tortured Poets Department.

            And we -- I the Substacker and you the reader -- were adhering strictly to the highest standards of legal and journalistic neutrality.        

            First of all:

            If you are a they, and therefore are wary of my addressing you as "you," then I hope we can posit that I am using "you" as either singular or plural, as y'all prefer.

            Back to Taylor and Donald. Calling them both, equally, by their first names. Because anybody, spotless or soiled, could be called either Taylor or Donald, but if I were to write "Swift and Trump," I would already be giving rise to connotations:

            Swift, ironically enough, connotes Trump in a hotel room -- or anywhere else -- with a sex worker, or anyone else.

            Trump, also ironically, connotes what Taylor is holding and what the rule of law should hold.

            Have I already betrayed a bias?

            Look at it this way:

If you were to show me photographs of both Taylor and Donald, and I were an Inuit or a Hottentot, say, who had just arrived on the scene, here, after spending my entire previous life in a strict traditional Inuit or Hottentot environment, and therefore had arrived with no inkling whatsoever of Donald's and Taylor's respective backstories --

            If all that were true, I think I would respond more positively to an image of Taylor than to one of Donald. And not just because she wears (I assume) subtler makeup.

            In fact, I can't see how any courtroom artist of any orientation could possibly sketch Taylor in such a way as to suggest that she was guilty of what Trump is charged with. (She may turn out to have withheld some percentage of herself from a tight end, but that is not illegal, and may in fact have gratified her followers.)

            And I can't see how any courtroom artist could portray Trump in such a way as to suggest that he was innocent of anything.

I mean, look at him.

            However, I can, sort of, see Trump as a tortured poet.

            In court he looks tortured, all right. Judges and jury-pool folks and media are all out to persecute him. Under the pressure of it all, he sometimes goes to sleep.

            But is he poetic?

            Here he is, at a rally for himself in Schneckville, PA, on the battle of Gettysburg, set as verse:

            Gettysburg.

            What an unbelievable battle that was.

            The Battle of Gettysburg.

            What an unbelievable -- I mean,

            It was so much and so interesting.

            And so vicious and horrible, and

            So beautiful in so many

            Different ways.

            It represented such a big portion

            Of the success of this country.

          Yes, well. Then he proceeds to do what any poet is ill-advised to do. He gets outside the poem and rattles on:

          "Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee -- who's no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor -- 'Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.'

            "They were fighting uphill, he said. Wow, that was a big mistake. He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”

Also, it didn’t happen. Lee never said anything of the sort. (“Me boys?” Please.) And he didn’t lose an important general at Gettysburg, and no historian has cited the slant of the terrain in that battle as any more important than usual.

      Historically, Trump is in over his head. But that’s where he feels at home. He has always managed to tiptoe across the bottom, while smiling as he if were cresting. Has managed to use other people's money (Russians', before the heat got so hot on that) to keep him bobbing afloat, because it is to their advantage. Until he dumps them. (Do you dump Russians as blithely as you do the rest of us? Just asking.)

            Now he is using Gettysburg to link him with Robert E. Lee. Until not many years ago, Lee was a figure of unity. North and South could agree on his rectitude, and get on with business. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Lee didn't exactly free the couple of black men who were his wartime servants, but he did start paying them something. And he didn't like slavery. He was a gent. After the war, the Union wanted to get back to dealing with whatever white folks, and so they did, and so they continue to, and let’s not quibble about who’s zooming who.

            In the last few years, we have seen that perspective change. Civil War history has shifted to a non-white perspective. (Which greatly simplifies a whole lot of endlessly analyzed battles.) And according to literal receipts recently discovered (see the Lee biography, Reading the Man, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who made the discovery), Lee, while not a flogger himself, did hire someone to whip some enslaved men who had been caught after escaping.

            Let it be said, for what it's worth, that Marse Robert inherited these men -- in fact, his wife inherited them and he . . . had to . . . deal with them while fighting . . . a war for God's sake.

            For what it's worth.

            To Trump, it's worth this: enables him to join hands with Lee as two guys out of favor, two recent victims of woke. Trump is finding some juice in a please-can’t-we-exhaust-it. Scaping a bit of political capital off the bloody Civil War.

            Whereas Taylor! Are we forgetting Taylor? How would she leverage Gettysburg?

            She wouldn't. Has no need to. Enjoys solidarity with women of the world. Otherwise, has a boyfriend who is in favor -- most of which favor is conferred upon him by her. She is free. She can steal, in one of her songs, Trump's home terrain:

            Florida!!!!

            You can beat the heat if you beat the charges too

            They said I was a cheat, I guess it must be true

            And my friends all smell like weed or little babies --

Wow! I was just about to take her to task — "beat what charges"? — when she went on to "my friends all smell like weed or little babies."

            That's poetic, folks. Good for her. She’s golden. Must be nice. Let us not let Trump get away with any lowgrade version of that.